FRIDAY 14 SEPTEMBER, 12.00-20.00 FRIDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 12.00-14.30 ESHS COUNCIL MEETING IoE - Room 709a 14.00-20.00 REGISTRATION Institute of Education - Level 3, Bedford Way entrance Registration will remain open at the Institute of Education 09.00-18.00 Saturday and Sunday, and at the Science Museum 09.00-18.00 Saturday and Sunday and 09.00-11.00 Monday 15.30-16.00 CONFERENCE WELCOME IoE - Logan Hall ESHS President: Dr Antoni Malet BSHS Vice-President: Dr Patricia Fara UCL STS HoD: Professor Joe Cain 16.00-17.00 NEUENSCHWANDER PRIZE LECTURE IoE - Logan Hall Chair: Professor Dr Erwin Neuenschwander Professor Robert Fox (University of Oxford) Memory, Celebrity, Diplomacy. The Marcellin Bertholet Centenary, 1927 17.00-17.30 AFTERNOON TEA 17.30-18.15 YOUNG SCHOLAR LECTURE 1 IoE - Logan Hall Chair: Dr Patricia Fara Dr Antonio Sánchez (Autonomous University of Madrid) Artisanal Cultures and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern Iberian World 18-15-19.00 YOUNG SCHOLAR LECTURE 2 IoE - Logan Hall Chair: Professor Ana Simões Professor Stephanie A. Dick (University of Pennsylvania) Making up Minds: Mathematics, Computing, and Automation in the Postwar World 19.00-19.15 WELCOME ON BEHALF OF THE BSHS & SCIENCE MUSEUM /CENTAURUS IoE - Logan Hall BSHS President: Dr Timothy Boon Centaurus Editor: Dr Koen Vermeir 19.15-20.00 WELCOME RECEPTION Institute of Education 1 SATURDAY 15 SEPTEMBER, 09.00-10.30 S07 EXPEDITIONS AND IMAGINARIES IN THE RUSSIAN/SOVIET BORDERLANDS Location: IoE – Room 802 Chair: Lajus, Julia Organiser(s): Jones, Susan D. Bridging Europe and Asia, the vast lands that have been under Russian and Soviet control were the 'living laboratories' of generations of scientists. How did Russian and Soviet scientists navigate political, environmental, and sociocultural entanglements while on expedition in the far reaches of the empire? To explore these and other questions, our case studies include: organizing Russian natural history expeditions and border crossings in the early 19th century; fin de siecle disease ecology expeditions in Central Asia; early 20th-century Russian/Soviet climate science expeditions; and comparative Soviet geological fieldwork after the Great Patriotic War. While most Anglophone histories of science and environmental histories have presented a unified picture of Tsarist and Soviet government control, our case studies reveal a much more nuanced situation for scientific thinking and practice beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. Producing knowledge and creating imaginaries for the borderlands was the work of geologists, biologists, anthropologists and others on multi-disciplinary expeditions that were an almost continuous feature of Russian science before, during and after the revolution. We present scientific work across time, borders, disciplinary and political differences, gender and ethnicity; and we bring new voices into the global history of science and environment. By spanning the 19th and 20th centuries and seeking to situate our historical case studies in trans-national context, we join a growing movement to integrate Russian/Soviet scientists' work and thinking into the broader historiography. Feklova, Tatiana (Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg) Cross the line: the expeditions and the borders. The Russian expeditions in the 19th century In 19th-century Russia, scientific expeditions were complex entities characterized by the need to navigate between the academy, government and merchant corporations (such as the Russian- American Company). Formed to help include places as distant as Russian America (now Alaska) to one space and formed united country Russian Impair, expeditions navigated much more than the difficulties of travel and scientific collecting. Organizational work prior to departure, and constant negotiation along the way, occupied a great deal of scientists’ time and effort. This work was an essential part of the expedition’s activities and successes, especially during this time period when the Russian government was organized according to a policy of “unity of command.” Initiative, funding requests, and problems while traveling all required scientists to communicate with central planners, Academy of Sciences functionaries, and the companies developing these regions. Using correspondence, ledgers, and letters to tribal leaders, this paper briefly traces themes in the work of three scientific expedition organizers: I. Voznesensky (1839 – 1849; Russian America), H. Fritsche (1867 – 1883; China) and H. Lenz (1829; Caucaus). These documents provide insight into how each expedition resolved border disputes; balanced utilitarian aims with scientific goals; and managed relationships with local peoples around the Russian empire. Jones, Susan D. (University of Minnesota) Disease Ecology and Colonial Visions in Russian Central Asia At the end of the 19th century, Turkestan (a vast region that includes today’s Central Asian republics) was a restless borderland of the Russian Empire. The colonial vision of making Turkestan productive, according to Tsarist (and later Soviet) goals, depended on agricultural development and natural resource extraction. Both were often destructive of local environments and people. By traveling to remote areas and identifying both resources and 1 SATURDAY 15 SEPTEMBER, 09.00-10.30 obstacles to development, scientific expeditions were crucial to reaching central government goals. But expeditions were also complex, multi-disciplinary assemblages of people with their own intentions, working far from the centers of political power. David Moon and other historians have recently argued that scientists’ work sometimes supported the opposite of colonial abuses: environmental preservation, conservation, and attempts to protect local citizens’ health and well-being. The present paper contributes to this discussion by focusing on two scientists, Evgeny Nikanorovich Pavlovsky and Polina Andreevna Petrischeva, whose fieldwork helped to explain and control diseases endemic to the borderlands (diseases such as plague and tick-borne encephalitis). How did these scientists on expedition interact with local people, and how did local interactions shape scientific ideas and practices? Why did Pavlovsky, Petrischeva, and others make the choices they did, in order to navigate political imperatives alongside scientific aims and local needs in Turkestan? Using published and unpublished reports, papers and photographs, this paper analyzes how the complex local cultures of fieldwork shaped scientists’ recommendations about settlement and agricultural development in the Central Asian borderlands. Oldfield, Jonathan, and Shaw, Denis B. (both University of Birmingham) Understandings of climate in Russia’s borderlands: Lev Berg and the desiccation debate Lev Berg (1876-1950) was a prominent Russian geographer, ichthyologist and climatologist whose career spanned the late tsarist, early Soviet and Stalin periods. Whilst Berg’s scientific activity was in many ways encyclopaedic, examining numerous facets of the physical environment both chronologically and spatially, climate and climate change were abiding interests throughout his life. The paper will focus on Berg’s determination to counteract the widespread belief in the desiccation of Central Asia (or even of the whole globe), advanced most notably by the Russian scholar and political activist Peter Kropotkin and the American geographer and environmentalist Ellsworth Huntington. Berg’s principal publication on this issue appeared in 1911, based on prolonged periods of fieldwork in Central Asia. The paper will consider the wide range of evidence he brought to bear on the issue (mirroring his concept of climate as intimately linked to the whole of the natural environment) and reflect upon the broader political and intellectual context in which the work is to be understood. Amramina, Anna A. (University of Minnesota) The Common Language of the Earth: Field Work in US-USSR Bilateral Cooperation in the 1970s–1980s The work done jointly by geoscientists in expedition builds an “environment of research”, an intellectual effort rooted in interactions with the material world of natural environments and laboratory settings. The collaborative nature of earth sciences encourages collective effort and creates a kind of camaraderie among researchers. The universal language of fieldwork can help transcend political tensions in international scientific communication, as it did for American and Soviet geologists, seismologists, and oceanographers in the 1970s – 1980s. This presentation will discuss the expeditionary component of multifaceted scientific activities under the bilateral US-USSR Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection of 1972 as a common identity for geoscientists. Non-verbal kinds of scientific information, from a rock sample to a landscape and observation data, are powerful tools of communication in earth sciences. They are of particular value when language barriers and political differences complicate the process of cooperation. Field work, often barring on adventure while being a way of scientific knowledge production, gave Cold War American and Soviet scientists a chance to become acquainted with each other and build a team. This presentation will follow oceanographic voyages, seismological rock physics experiments, and geological landscape excursions from California to Siberia and people who spoke a common language of field work. 2 SATURDAY 15 SEPTEMBER, 09.00-10.30 S30 THE SCIENCE OF REST IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY